Vladimir Putin spins Russian Spring in Ukraine

Helen Womack

Moscow: If there was any doubt that the Russian-speaking insurgents in eastern Ukraine were being directed by the Kremlin, they were dispelled on hearing rebel leader Denis Pushilin pick up the words of President Vladimir Putin on the subject of Novorossiya or New Russia.

The term “Novorossiya” might have been familiar to historians but was hardly common currency until Mr Putin used it in his question and answer session with the Russian public on April 17. It refers to a swathe of Ukrainian territory from Kharkiv in the north-east to Odessa in the south-west that was conquered for Russia by Catherine the Great. It seems President Putin intends to conquer it again.

“It’s New Russia,” the Kremlin leader said. “Kharkiv, Luhansk, Donetsk, Odessa were not part of Ukraine in Tsarist times. They were transferred in 1920 (after the Bolshevik Revolution). Why? God knows.”

Within days, Mr Pushilin, self-declared chairman of the Donetsk People’s Republic, was echoing Mr Putin, calling for a body to unite the dozen or so cities and towns in “Novorossiya” where barricades have gone up and public buildings are being occupied by armed militants.

“Recent events in Slavyansk (a flashpoint where a handful of people have been killed on both sides) dictate the immediate creation of a single co-ordinating council for the whole of Novorossiya,” he told the news website Nakanune.ru

“A co-ordinating council for Novorossiya is undoubtedly needed and it should be a collegiate organ – there are no other options – which will elect one person as a representative, not a leader or a president but a representative, to express the common opinion,” he said.

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Little is known about Mr Pushilin, 32, except that he used to work as a security guard, a confectionary distributor and a promoter for the notorious MMM pyramid scheme, whose founder Sergei Mavrodi was jailed in 2007 for cheating naive Russian investors out of millions of dollars. Suspiciously quickly, Mr Pushilin has acquired a political vocabulary that includes expressions such as “collegiate organs”.

More than that, he has called for a “chain of referenda” across eastern and southern Ukraine of the kind that enabled Russia to annex Crimea in March. The referenda are due to be held on May 11.

Nakanune.ru published a map of how the separatists envisage Ukraine in the future, showing Russia or Russia-allied areas in red and a truncated Ukraine in blue. Indeed, according to this plan, Ukraine loses its entire Black Sea coastline and becomes a small, landlocked country.

Thus, without yet moving any of the tanks or troops massed threateningly on Ukraine’s border, Russia has already destablised Ukraine to the extent that it will be hard for Kiev to hold national presidential elections on May 25. Voting will be disrupted, if not blocked, in eastern and southern regions and Moscow will be able to declare the elections invalid.

While the West has rumbled the Kremlin’s game and begun to impose sanctions, most ordinary Russians either don’t understand it or they approve. Many genuinely believe that the “pindosi”, as they call the Americans, have offended them and that they are the victims in the new cold war.

“Pindos”, criminal slang for a weakling, was used of US soldiers in Kosovo and now applies to all Americans. Since NATO bombed Belgrade in 1999, many Russians believe the US has been allowed to throw its weight around the world while their disregarded country has been denied the same right.

“What do you think about the pindosi breaking up our union, then?” said a taxi driver in a typical comment on Ukraine.

“There’s so much Russophobia these days,” said a cellist.

“Ukraine’s our space,” said an educated businesswoman.

At best, Russians who perhaps disagree with the bullying of Ukraine say that the situation is “sad”. But then they often add that “politicians are all the same, aren’t they?” This only goes to show how well the old KGB tactic of “false equivalence” – of deliberately drawing false parallels – is working.

According to Russian propaganda, what is happening in eastern Ukraine now is the “Russian Spring”, no different from the Prague Spring or the Arab Spring or any other mass popular revolution. With their balaclavas and barricades of car tyres, the separatists in “Novorossiya” are just like the protestors of EuroMaidan in Kiev, who ousted President Viktor Yanukovich in February.

Russians relying only on state television could be forgiven for equating pro-Russia protests in eastern Ukraine that have drawn crowds in the low thousands with pro-Europe protests in Kiev that attracted, at conservative estimates, half a million.

True, in Kiev, some extreme Ukrainian nationalists mingled in the crowd. But until sniping started, killing more than 100 people, protesters had mainly come to Maidan (Independence Square) as to a carnival. They were armed with jokey cardboard shields in contrast with the real weapons on display in “Novorossiya”.

And in Kiev, there were no incidences of hostage-taking comparable with the pro-Russian insurgents’ capture of seven observers from the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe. Or anything similar to the way the mayor of Kharkiv, Hennadiy Kernes, who rejected separatism, was shot in the back and left fighting for his life.

But when the waters are muddied, it is easy for apolitical citizens to be confused.

“In Luhansk, self-defence militias disarm local police,” read the headline in Komsomolskaya Pravda on April 30. “Self-defence groups and their sympathisers came to the main nest of police and suggested they surrendered,” was the slant of the reporting. It would have been quite a different angle had the attack on a police station happened not in Ukraine but in the Russian-controlled Northern Caucasus, for example. Then the word “terrorism” would have been used.

On the same day, Moskovsky Komsomolets informed readers that Russians were now as happy as they had been in the USSR and hinted that President Putin might turn up “under the noses of the Ukrainians” on Victory Day (May 9), perhaps in the Crimean port of Sevastopol.

This is the patriotic diet, and since it is not easy to find alternative reporting or commentary distinctive opinions are also few and far between. If you question the official line you risk being called a “traitor” or “fifth columnist” or worse.

“I keep my mouth shut at work,” said a Muscovite who is not happy with developments. “I feel very isolated.”

The Russian opposition has all but been wiped out. Anti-corruption blogger Alexei Navalny, who won a third of the vote in Moscow mayoral elections last year, is under house arrest, without access to the internet, and facing another trial on what he calls fabricated charges of embezzlement.

Pavel Durov, the founder of VKontakte, the Russian equivalent of Facebook, has gone into exile after coming under pressure from the FSB security service to reveal users’ identities and block dissident voices.

Only Echo of Moscow radio remains, like a reservation for the intelligentsia, where listeners can hear Yulia Latynina calling Putin an ayatollah and comparing Russia with Iran or Nikolai Svanidze giving a nuanced view of the Ukraine crisis.

In the 21st century, imperial expansion was outmoded, he said. “Unfortunately, in our history leaders who expanded the state have always been popular. What happened in those conquered regions didn’t particularly matter. Quantity was more important that quality. Square kilometres trumped citizens, not only their rights but very often their lives. Furthermore, the more human lives were thrown into the furnace of conquest the more the conquest was valued.”